Amazon S3 as the business file system. Why keeping files in your own AWS account often beats moving them to Dropbox or SharePoint.

Many companies already keep contracts, invoices, project folders and media in Amazon S3, because an application, scanner, export job or engineer put them there. Staff outside engineering cannot work with those files, so the usual proposal is to move everything to Dropbox or SharePoint.

This paper argues that for archives of several terabytes, buckets that other systems write to, and files that must stay in the company’s own AWS account, the better answer is to keep the files where they are and add a people layer on top. S3 already provides durable storage, versioning, retention, lifecycle tiering and replication. What it lacks is a safe, familiar way for people to find, open and share files. That gap can be closed without a migration.